Friday, March 09, 2007

Ya think?

The fuel which powers the engine of our faith is, as I keep hammering, a proper and thorough catechesis. Catechesis is crucial both for the student and the teacher. (In fact, every half-decent catechist I've ever met over the last decade invariably tells of learning more as they teach.) Once a real effort to catechize, to consolidate whatever gains have been made by evangelization, ceases, the whole thing begins to corrode before us, like an electromagnetic field when you power off. Sometimes I imagine you can shut your eyes and hear the corrosion like some far-away Alka-Seltzer.

What's more, a badly catechized population becomes ever-more hostile to proper catechesis. Like in real estate or equities, buying back what you gave away costs more than what you paid the first time...never mind the resources that have been wasted. It also throws open the door to ever cretinous heresy and halfwitted dissent and idiotic blasphemy and hatefully cruel, stupid slander that man can conceive. Once these spiritual termites take hold, the difficult task metamorphoses into the near-impossible. Hubris, not reverence, becomes the spiritual beacon of a time and culture.

What is ever more vexing is that those who are called upon to safeguard (bishops, say) are quite often the ones who are asleep at their post or complicit in the corrosion of faith.

During this Lenten time, I think it'd be useful to reflect on what we, individually, have done to aid and abet this corrosion. And repent. And go and sin no longer.